Amanda Shires makes expressive connection

Amanda Shires makes an expressive connection

Published 5:30 am, Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Amanda Shires started playing the violin at age 10. Within five years, she was performing onstage.

Amanda Shires started playing the violin at age 10. Within five years, she was performing onstage.

Amanda Shires makes expressive connection

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

Amanda Shires gives the impression that she wasn't made for these times, and not just because her album has several songs about people who fly high and fall hard, often for love, all sung in a richly expressive, sometimes whispery voice.

Shires' new album, Carrying Lightning (out May 3), is aptly titled, an early bet to be one of the year's enduring sleepers. It opens with Swimmer, a song of longing nudged into motion with Shires' whistling.

"It seems to me like a lot of old-timers whistle," she says. "My granddad, I always used to hear him whistling. It's such a refreshing sound. Most anybody can do it, it's an easy and cheap instrument. But there's also an old sort of sound to it that I like.

"I guess the goal in all this is communication. Finding something to connect with people. I guess it's just another way to express myself."

Shires says she typically has a difficult time doing just that, but she seems to have found an outlet with her songs, which are detail-rich and impressionistic. They often seem concerned with communication or the after-effects of poor communication. In conversation, Shires is humble and polite to the point of being instantly lovable. But she doesn't seem to be a natural talker, her comments short and simple.

After a brief quiet spell she breaks the silence. "Maybe we could talk about feathers."

By all means.

She's a feather enthusiast and seems to know much about them, starting with a debunking of the common parental knowledge that fallen feathers are filthy and not to be touched. "Any parasites have left after the feather is shed," she says. "You can also wash them, you use the same stuff you put on dogs and rosebushes. ... I guess this has turned into 'How to Care for Your Feathers' by Amanda Shires."

She says she has quite a few, some of which have been turned into headbands.

More specifically Shires says she "likes everything outside. I have a tambourine that has bones attached to it that are found. Antlers, I like all that outside stuff. It's magical to me that deer can have these things and shed them. I guess it's not that magical to some people."

Some of this is attributable to Shires growing up in Lubbock and Mineral Wells. Trains also made an impression. And they've informed one of the album's standout tracks, the beautiful and melancholy When You Need a Train It Never Comes. "I mean, there's nothing sadder than trains," she says, pointing out their role in taking people, sometimes unhappily, from someone or somewhere. "It also helps that they're so loud, so noisy. They make an impression in different ways.

"I think most country people can relate to trains." She pauses. "And guns ... and hardship ... and drinking."

Shires' dual hometowns stem from her parents' divorce, which in some way may have put her on track to make music. She was 10 and staying with her father in Mineral Wells when he was buying a new knife at the store. ("He's like that," she says, "a hunter guy.") She saw a weathered violin in the store and felt drawn to it. Shires' father decided to buy it for her.

Her earliest efforts on the instrument resulted in four busted strings, and she swears subsequent playing actually made a dog howl. "I think he may have done it to get back at (my mom)," she says of her father. But her mother sprung for lessons and the instrument stuck.

Within five years she was performing. Shires started playing in college with the Lubbock band the Thrift Store Cowboys and still joins the group when time allows. More recently she relocated to Nashville, where she fell in with a community of like-minded players like Justin Townes Earle and Jason Isbell (she fiddles on his latest album and she says he owes her $20 after she got him drunk and beat him at pool) who aren't producing radio-ready country; at least not radio-ready by today's standards in country music.

"I'm one of those people who never wanted to live there, but it's been a good thing for me," she says. "It forced me out of my comfort zone. It forced me to do what it is I wanted to do. I wanted to start completely over."

She says Nashville has also been a better headquarters for touring. She points out Lubbock to Houston is only a bit shorter than Nashville to Washington, D.C. Shires was back in Texas in March for a series of dates and plans to return for more in August. It seems likely she'll be back regularly. Her album has been receiving reams of good press along with comparisons to such far-flung influences as Dolly Parton and Tom Waits, likely due to her use of vivid imagery applied in an internalized, contemplative manner.

"I definitely think I do that, I write from what I see," she says. "I don't know, my thoughts can seem so abstract sometimes. I don't know how to define them except for what I see when I'm feeling something. I've never been good at communication. So I try to describe it that way."